Anyway, I've been sharking to try to clean up some hotspots and am debating wether I should have the shadow volumes of static ( e.g. immobile geometry ) continue to be cached in a display list or wether I should just draw it in immediate mode.

I'll post results, but at the moment I'm curious if anybody has suggestions, or experience to share.

That's a good point. My current quasi-stress-test scenario is a ton ( well, about 250 ) of meshes with about 60 or so triangles apiece. The meshes themselves are drawn via display lists, but it's shadow drawing that's taking up something like 30 percent CPU time. Oddly, it's not the volume projection, but the drawing of the volume that's the big hit ( according to shark ).

Well, I guess that makes sense since the drawing is when the geometry is uploaded.

I'm thinking now that there's probably a threshold point over which display lists become useful, and under which they cost too much. I guess the trick is finding that point...